


Family Names and Family Matters

by sunkelles



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Discussions of marriage, F/F, Snaibsel, The Last Name Debate, past spitfire - Freeform, the last name talk, they're engaged!!!!!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-31
Updated: 2017-05-31
Packaged: 2018-11-07 04:18:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11051181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunkelles/pseuds/sunkelles
Summary: Zatanna and Artemis are engaged, and Zatanna decides that it's time they had the last name talk. Artemis makes it much easier than Zatanna expected it to be.





	Family Names and Family Matters

When Artemis asked Zatanna to marry her she said yes immediately. Of course she said yes. She’s loved her for years, and they’ve well together as a couple for almost as long. Zatanna wants to marry her more than anything.

Zatanna does, however, have some details that _she_ would have gotten ironed out before proposing if she’d been the one getting down on one knee.

Both Zatanna and Artemis are reckless. They both tend to rush headfirst into things without thinking them through, but Zatanna was raised by a cautious, Catholic father. She has had the basics of sorting out the nitty gritty aspects of relationships and marriages drilled into her head for her entire life.

She knows that they need to know where they both stand on having kids. She knows that they need to know how they plan to manage their finances. She knows that they need to figure out if they plan to move around a lot or if they want to find one specific spot and settle down there.

She also knows that she can bring that up late and deal with all that on her own time. She does, however, want to get one detail worked out tonight. Tonight, she wants to figure out what they’re doing for last names.

Last names are a delicate subject, and she knows that they require thought and often compromise. Zatanna won’t change her name. She knows that already, because the name Zatara is important to her. It’s her father’s name, and she couldn’t imagine giving it up, _especially_ now that her father is Doctor Fate. She doesn’t mind hyphenating, though, if Artemis wants to. She also doesn’t mind the idea of them both keeping their last names exactly the way that they are.

She rips herself out of her head, and decides that they need to start actually working this out instead of her just thinking it over.

“Artemis?” Zatanna asks. Artemis looks up from the iPad and sends her a confused look.

“Yeah babe?”

“I wanted to ask you something.” Artemis sets the iPad down on her lap and sends her a slightly concerned look.

“Ask away,” she says, putting her arms up in invitation or surrender.

“What do you want to do for last names?” Artemis lies back on the couch, and she looks visibly relieved. She actually laughs.

“What is it?” Zatanna asks. She hears her own confusion in her tone.

“I thought you were gonna ask me something hard.”

“That _is_ hard,” Zatanna says, “we have to figure out exactly what we want to do for that.”

“I _know_ what I want to do for that,” Artemis says confidently. Zatanna isn’t sure that she likes the sound of that. Confident Artemis is sexy, but confident Artemis’s ideas of how things should be run don’t always correspond with confident Zatanna’s ideas of how things should be run.

“And what is that?”

“I’m taking your name,” Artemis says.

“Wait, really?” Zatanna asks. It can’t be that easy.

“Yeah, really.”

“You want to take my name?” Zatanna asks. She never imagined her wife actually wanting to just straight up take her name.

“Yeah,” Artemis says, “you love your name. It’s important to you.”

“It is," Zatanna says, and she phrases it as a question. Zatanna isn't sure how Artemis's response answered her question. 

“Mine isn’t.”  
  
“But it’s still your name,” Zatanna says. Artemis rolls her eyes.

“It’s my dad’s name, Zee,” Artemis says, “not mine.”

“But you grew up with it, didn’t you get attached?”

“God no, have you ever heard my name, Crock. _Crock!_ Makes me sound like a crackpot. You know, I was actually thinking of switching to Nguyen when I was eighteen.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I decided it would be easier to wait until marriage,” Artemis says. It takes Zatanna all of one second to realize what _that_ meant. It meant that Artemis had been thinking about marrying Wally then and taking his name. She was planning to be Artemis West.

Zatanna knows better than to delve deeper into _that_ conversation. Artemis has assured her a million times that she isn’t just a replacement for Wally, that while she won’t ever stop loving the guy, she loves Zatanna just as much as loved him and she wants to walk down the aisle with her.

Or walk down the aisle to greet her. Or wait for her at the end of the aisle. They haven’t exactly worked out the details of how they want their wedding to work yet.

 

Zatanna doesn’t ask if Artemis regrets that she won’t be Artemis West. She doesn't ask if she wishes they lived in a different timeline, or if she wants a rewrite. She knows that these come from her own insecurity, and she knows the answers anyway. 

Instead she asks, “You sure you want to be Artemis Zatara?”

Artemis grins as she says, “more sure than anything else. My initials are gonna be AZ. How fucking cool is that?” Zatanna grins. That _is_ pretty fucking cool.

“Mrs. and Mrs. Zatara,” Zatanna muses, “I could get used to that.”

“You’d better start now,” Artemis says, “you’ll be stuck with me for a _long_ time.”

“I’d sure hope so,” Zatanna says with a grin on her face, “I was raised Catholic, baby. I mate for life.”

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. based slightly on a talk i had a few years ago with my straight female friends about last names and why they wanted to take their future husband's last name. one of them had a bad relationship with her father, and i thought that definitely applied to artemis.


End file.
